A Project About Male Circumcision in the Veneto

Abstract

For the first time in Italy, a strong position has been taken against the practice of male circumcision on therapeutic grounds, at the expense of public health authorities, in a small town, Conegliano, Veneto. The hospital’s training service investigated the reasons for which the local medical authorities had decided to reclassify a request for male circumcision, on therapeutic grounds, from a free procedure to a paid one. For this reason, research was undertaken to show that, in recent years, the request for male circumcision considerably increased among Muslim families. It was impossible to understand the real reason for that because all the families had made a request for therapeutic circumcision through their own doctor. By checking the number of these requests, it was noticed that, after the request for male circumcision was reclassified from a free procedure to a paid one, these requests diminished. We also know that some Muslim families used operators who came from their same geographical area in Africa, but the results sometimes were terrible. As reported by the press, one boy in Veneto and another in Puglia died from hemorrhage, caused when the glans was cut off during circumcision. The echo of such research has had consequences in other public health services, where the possibility of creating a ticket-payment for circumcision began to be considered.